Crash Lights and Sirens, Book 1 (11 page)

Falvey’s just grinning, meanwhile, knees slightly bent and one of them rocking back and forth. Nick can see where she’s pink and swollen, but barely; he reaches down and wraps a hand around her ankle, spreads her open himself.

She’s slick, he can see that clear as day with the blinds up. Nick’s about to give her a hard time, lick everywhere but where she wants it, when he realizes something. “Falvey,” he starts, peering at all that newly exposed skin. “Is this gonna be…?” He backs off and drags his day-old stubble against her inner thigh to demonstrate, watching it burn up pink right away. She marks up so easily, Christ, all that delicate redhead skin. It’s possible Nick remembered and didn’t shave on purpose, that night in the truck and how much he liked seeing her chest and neck go red from him. He never once anticipated that she’d—God. Completely bare like that, it’s gonna hurt.

“Oh.” Falvey doesn’t look so smug anymore, up on her elbows to watch him. Nick’s about to call it quits and just start fingering her when she speaks up again. “It’s okay, that’s not— I like it.” Right after she says it, that bottom lip gets tucked between her teeth, like she’s thinking about taking it back. Too late, because Nick heard. He definitely, definitely heard.

“Sure,” he says evenly, trying not to act like a guy who feels like the top of his own head is about to come off. Only then he tests it out, rubbing his scratchy chin against that soft, white skin. Just to see what she’ll do.

Whimper, as the answer turns out. More than whimper really, this truly desperate sound Nick’s never heard from her before, knees thudding to either side on the mattress like she’s begging for more of it. She wants it, Jesus, rough and—yeah. Nick loses his cool then.

All told, he convinces her to get pretty loud, sloppy sucking at her clit and the entire lower half of his face gone wet. No finesse at all, but it doesn’t seem to matter. The whole production takes maybe two minutes from start to finish, tops.

“Oh my God,” Taryn pants when she’s through, tugging at him. “Come up here. Nick, Nick, come up here.” She’s not even really done, Christ—Nick can still feel her twitching against his chin—but hearing his name like that is a pretty good incentive to move.

She muscles him down tight as soon as he’s in reaching distance, a look on her face like maybe she just shocked herself. Nick lets her manhandle him, skinny arms and legs, all this surprising strength he knows she has from watching her handle a stretcher alone. Most paramedics retire by age forty from back injuries, a statistic Falvey seems determined to join.

“You okay?” he asks, kissing her jaw. Taryn nods, head tucked into his neck. Nick’s going to lighten the mood then, tease her maybe, but then he catches a glance down between their bodies—already, fuck, already she’s turning pink everywhere his stubble touched—and what comes out instead is, “You like that, huh?”

Taryn rolls her eyes. “I mean,” she starts, and Nick’s waiting for the inevitable smartass comment, but she changes course midsentence and makes a face at herself instead, like she’s embarrassed. She shrugs once, this fast up and down into the pillows. “Pretty much, yeah.”

Nick nods. It feels strangely like he’s won something, that she’s willing to make herself even that vulnerable, to admit even that much to him out loud. She’s a hard nut to crack, this girl. “Okay,” he says, dragging her lower lip down so he can kiss her, the pad of his thumb skating along the sharp ridge of her bottom teeth. “Good.”

For a minute they just lie there and stare at each other, Falvey’s hair red and wild and this honest-looking expression on her face he’s never seen before, like if he pressed her she might tell him a secret. Then she blinks and it’s gone. “Okay,” she announces loudly, the fucking Celtics breaking a huddle at the end of halftime. She reaches down and yanks at the waistband of his boxers, sliding her hand inside. “Come on.”

So. Moment over then. Nick groans as she wraps her small fist around the width of him, dragging her hand up to circle the slippery head and using the other to tug the cotton down over his hips. He pushes himself into her touch even as he’s working one hand underneath her to get to the hooks on her bra. For a second they’re a tangle of limbs and underwear, Falvey giggling like she’s really into this fun game the two of them are playing. After that, they’re a hundred percent naked in his bed.

They stop for another second, Taryn’s eyes flicking fast up and down his body and Nick fully aware that he’s staring at her golden-pink nipples and not being able to do hell of a lot to stop himself. Her chest is moving hard with the force of her breath. Taryn breaks first, which shouldn’t surprise him. “Move,” she says, shoving him onto his back so she can investigate more thoroughly, swinging one leg up and over so she’s straddling his waist. His hands migrate to her thighs all on their own. “Tell me you came prepared this time,” she orders.

Nick laughs. “In the nightstand,” he says, letting her go for them on her own. She’ll appreciate the opportunity to snoop, he thinks, not that there’s really anything for her to find in there. Also, her up on all fours and reaching off the edge of the bed is—Jesus. It is a view. She’s got a tattoo at the small of her back, what he thinks is a pair of antlers, ram’s horns maybe. He noticed it way back on the night of the fire, didn’t get a good look at until now. “What’s that?” he asks, leaning forward to trace it with one finger.

Taryn snorts. “S’a tramp stamp,” she says, reaching back to brush his hand away. “Don’t look.” Then, glancing over her shoulder and grinning at him, kind of sheepishly, “I got it when I was sixteen, like an idiot. I’m an Aries.”

“I’m a Capricorn.” Nick grins back, nods at the dark-blue ink. “I like it,” he tells her.

“You would.” Taryn rolls her eyes, turning her attention to the nightstand before he can ask her what that means. “Nerd,” she pronounces right on cue, finding the men’s extra strength body lotion Nick rubs into his hands during the winter months, how they’re constantly removing their gloves to work on patients. Taryn’s own hands are rough and red, nails bitten all the way down. Nick likes how they feel against him way too much.

“I exfoliate too,” he tells her, watching as she looks over the couple paperbacks he keeps on the nightstand, Grisham and a couple of Hardy Boys he got back when they cleaned out his parents’ house, the Greek Orthodox Bible that used to be his mother’s. Finally she comes back to straddle him, dropping the foil packet on his abdomen and leaning in for a kiss. Nick hands it back to her when she pulls away, closing her fingers around it. “See if you can’t handle that.”

Falvey smirks, ripping open the packet and wrapping her small, chapped fist around him again, jacking hard. She does it for way longer than she needs to, past the point of fully erect until Nick’s leaking pretty seriously, bucking up into her hand. She’s got a mean streak, no question, watching his face like she’s looking to prove a point.

Nick breathes. “Okay, can you just—” He reaches between her legs to retaliate, all that roughed-up smooth skin. Falvey hisses when he finds her clit, scooting up higher to hover over her working hand, close enough that the head of his cock is almost touching her body on the downstroke. The condom is still tucked up inside her fist.

“Are you, um…” Taryn gulps, thighs shaking. “Are you, like, clean? Because I’m on the pill and…” She trails off, looking down at herself. Nick catches her meaning just fine.

God. He’s mostly used to the latex now, twice with her and once with the private-school teacher from Great Barrington, but he remembers what it felt like with Maddie, and anyone who tells you it isn’t better without is fucking lying. “I’m clean, yeah,” he says, backing off her clit and slipping one finger inside. She’s so crushingly warm, all that slick, gripping muscle.

“Okay.” Falvey bites her lip, fucking herself down to the second knuckle. “So am I. And I mean—I trust you if you trust me.”

Nick cups her with his whole hand. She’s messier without the hair, wet all the way down to the crease of her thighs. “I trust you,” he says.

“Okay,” Taryn repeats, breathless. The condom gets dropped to the bedspread as she reaches down to line them up. Nick moves his hand so she can do it properly, every sensation amped up to eleven without the barrier. “It feels really good like this,” she promises him, just before she sinks down. “Feels awesome.”

Awesome
is one way to describe it, Nick guesses. Christ God, her mutable eyes half-lidded as she works herself open on him, way slower than the other night in the Tahoe and how that plus how bare she is means he can watch her take every single inch. It’s not until she bottoms out that he realizes he’s been holding his breath the entire time. “Okay?” he asks, once he trusts his own voice not to screw with him. She’s stretched ridiculously tight around his cock.

Taryn’s eyes open wide and sudden, like she just performed a magic trick and she’s holding for applause. “Yeah,” she says, nodding hard and fast. She moves on him, experimental, pulling halfway off and sinking back down. Something hits for her, that same spot from the other night maybe, and she lets out a sharp, wordless sound. “Yeah, that’s—um.” Taryn’s spine arches, like she’s angling for more of it. “That’s good.”

“Good.” Nick lets her set the pace, this slow, heavy rhythm and the lean muscles in her thighs flexing under his hands. The soles of her feet are cold when they brush his calves. He slides his palms up her rib cage till he gets to her breasts, thumbing at the nipples so they’re standing up swollen and stiff.

Taryn breathes in. “That,” she says when he tugs on them, not hard but hard enough to get her attention. He wants to suck and bite all of a sudden, to leave marks in way more places than just the milk-pale hollow of her throat. “Jesus, Nick, please—”

“Not gonna stop.” Fuck, he likes that way more than he should, both the
please
and how she sounds when she says it. Wants to make her repeat it again and again. She’s moving faster now, short nails pricking his skin as her fingertips dig into his shoulders to keep her balance. Nick keeps his hands on her body. Taryn’s head falls forward, her long hair brushing his cheek.

“Jesus, you’re pretty,” he murmurs, so quiet that until she whimpers in response he’s not sure she even heard. She likes it, Nick thinks, when he talks to her during—at the very least, she seemed to like it the other night in the truck. He forgot this, the learning curve of being with somebody new, or maybe it’s something he never really knew to begin with. “I mean it, Falvey. You’re fucking incredible. I can’t—”

Taryn comes on a sob, the clutch and shudder of her body and Nick feeling every last wave of it, nothing in between them at all. She looks at him while she works herself through, pleasure and a wry kind of surprise like this is some great inside joke they’re sharing. It’s official, fuck: he really, really likes getting her off.

Really, really likes her, period.

It seems like a good one, how long it takes her to ease down from it. Every time Nick touches her spine she shivers, so he keeps doing it. “What do you want?” she demands breathlessly after the third time, and it’s the closest she’s sounded to begging since they got up here. “Nick. Hey. Tell me what you want.” She rolls her hips down hard even though she’s got to still be sensitive. It’s only in the last possible second that Nick stops himself from saying
you
.

“I don’t—” He threads one hand through the hair at her neck, tugging. She’s got her elbows locked, palms still braced on his shoulders. It’s a great view, those rose-gold nipples bobbing, but all of a sudden he wants her closer. “Come here.”

Taryn’s eyebrows shoot up for a second, like that wasn’t the request she was expecting. When she leans down to kiss him, Nick notices her hands are shaking. “Supposed to ask for something dirty,” she murmurs, slurring the consonants against his mouth. “Now you’ll never know what I was willing to do.”

Nick laughs, a little strangled as her hips pick up speed. “That so?” She’s pressed against him chest to chest now, knees pretzeled in a deep bend on either side of his body.

Taryn rolls her eyes and nips at his chin, scooting up to knock their foreheads together playfully. “That is so,” she confirms, this scratchy-gravel voice Nick’s pretty sure is supposed to be him. Her fair eyelashes are practically brushing his own. “And for the record?” she says as herself, dropping the tone down to a whisper. “I would have done anything.”

Fuck. Nick comes with an unexpected groan and two sloppy, rhythmless thrusts, as abrupt as if she reached inside and cut the strings of his control with a knife. He had plans to pull out, be as safe as possible, but that completely doesn’t happen as he buries himself to the hilt on purpose and jerks, both hands on her ass to hold her in place. She’s tight and wet and he only makes her wetter, pulsing for what feels like forever. It’s good. God, it’s so inhumanly good. Taryn giggles, biting at his jaw.

“There,” she says when it’s over, bearing down with her inner walls deliberately to wring the last of it out of him. Nick’s cock jumps, overstimulated, and Taryn laughs again. Mean streak. Oh yeah. “Take me up on it next time,” she murmurs in his ear, lifting off to let him slip out. She drops back down against his abdomen and Nick can feel the rest of the mess sliding out of her, his own—

“I’ll do that,” he says, as evenly as possible. She’s still grinning against his shoulder, smug. God as his witness, Nick’s first instinct is to put her over his knee. “When’s next time?” he asks instead, making a fist in her hair.

Taryn shrugs, shoulders moving inside his grip. “Whenever you want.” Only then she levers herself into a push-up, peering down at him curiously. “Um. When do you want?” Nick can tell he’s being felt out again, same as he was Friday morning at work, all
why are you paying
and
is this a date
. He’d be hard pressed to say for what. For some reason he’s absurdly worried she’ll spook if he gives the wrong answer.